Dutch consumers to pay 5 EURO per PC to compensate copyright losses

The Dutch government has decided that Dutch consumers will need to pay copyright fees when purchasing computers, smartphones, set top boxes, audio and video equipment and HDDs. Every new computer and smartphone or tablet with more than 16GB of storage will have a copyright fee of €5,-  ($6.5) . Smartphones and tablets with less than 16GB will get a fee of €2,5 ($3.25).  Also PVRs and set top boxes with a HDD of more than 160GB will have the €5,- fee applied and buyers of an external HDD, no matter what the capacity is, will have to pay €1,- ($1.30) and a fee on CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, already in place, remains at € 0,03 a piece.At the same time, the government has decided that the copyright fee that's currently in place for Minidisks and analogue tapes will disappear because they are hardly sold anymore.

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The Dutch  government were against a copyright fee before and instead would have liked to introduce new legislation to deal with copyright issues. However that will take time and in the meanwhile they had to come up with a solution as a Dutch judge ruled that in case they would not introduce such a fee the Dutch government would need to pay artists to compensate them for losses due to copying of their content. The new copyright fee will be collected starting 2013.

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